


the length of this coldness

by TolkienGirl



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [168]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Foreshadowing, Gen, Grief, Mithrim, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Very Bad Coping Mechanisms, it's the last day before...big changes, title from a poem by Hilda Morley, you know the drill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21895759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Amras can hope.
Relationships: Amras & Amrod (Tolkien), Amras & Sons of Fëanor, Amras (Tolkien) & Original Female Character(s)
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [168]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 1
Kudos: 21





	the length of this coldness

_Yes,_ Amras says, sometimes to Mollie, sometimes to the face in the water. _I do believe we’re all a little mad._

Mornings in Mithrim are quiet and flagstone-cool. Mithrim’s stores are not particularly short, though there are whispers that a harsher winter than usual is soon coming.

Caranthir said so, on _this_ very morning, while he dressed. 

Celegorm, who was shaving before the green-speckled glass in Athair’s old room, spat soap into the basin beside him. “Here? They wouldn’t know a harsh winter if it kicked them in the teeth.”

“Be that as it may,” Caranthir retorted. “Thingol of Doriath is responsible for keeping half this territory alive. You shouldn’t have chivied his messenger.”

“Chivied?” mocked Curufin, as Celegorm wheeled around.

Celegorm was liable to throw things, in private or—anywhere, if provoked. Amras slipped out looking for Mollie. She still didn’t sleep well, of nights. Nightmares were a common currency in this cold place.

Yes, to Amras’s mind, it is cold. November, or near December, will bring a chill to any air. Even were it not so, Amras has a teeth-grinding terror of December, of the end of the year.

Of the end of—

 _Come now,_ Amrod comforts him. _You’re taller than me. Have someone mark the door, when our birthday passes by._

 _No_ , Amras tells him, fiercely. _I couldn’t bear it._

But they bear so much, these days. They bear so much, because they are made rulers of men many times their age and experience. Curufin may welcome the responsibility, but Maglor is crushed by it and Amras—

Chews and swallows disgust.

He finds Mollie, who does not like to step out of stables to seek breakfast alone. Not while Nora and the other women lurk. Months among the people of Mithrim have not changed her. Together, then, they walk the rim of the pond, and Amras offers her a heel of bread and an apple.

“Where is Maglor?” she asks. She smells like the horses. At Amras’s insistence, she earns her keep by tending to them, and he helps where he can.

“In the study. He was up before any of us.”

“He was out, in the night.” She speaks hesitantly; not because she is afraid of Amras (they are friends) but perhaps because she is afraid that whatever she is about to say will hurt him. “You know he slips out, and walks and walks.”

“Yes,” Amras says. “You’ve told me.”

“He talks to himself.” Mollie breaks the bread in two. The missing finger does not seem to hinder her. “But never mind. I’ll say no more.”

A ghost boy might press her. But Amras is tired, and he knows. He knows that Maglor…

“Winter’s setting in, Mollie,” Amras says. His voice cracks mid-sentence. He’s heard that break in the voices of five of his brothers. He hates to hear it in his own. “You can’t stay in the stables forever.”

He doesn’t find Maglor. The day rolls on, grey. There is a different quality to the air than there was in the red-banded mountains, where last November found them. Amras holds his memories at arm’s length, for all of them are vicious with edges.

Curufin insists that they take at least one meal a day with the Mithrim-dwellers. Maglor agreed, bleary-eyed and wry-mouthed, but rarely joins them. As such, there are only four of them among the men and women. Four of Athair’s seven sons.

Amras picks at his boiled vegetables and roast meat. Curufin and Celegorm dominate the two head corners of the table, half to conceal Maglor’s perennial absence, half to lean close together so that Curufin can speak into Celegorm’s ear whenever he wishes.

Roast meat would have been a luxury, a year ago. Amras swallows hard. His throat itches for the sting of alcohol. He has never—wanted that, before.

Maitimo had a flask—

_We cannot all afford to be drunkards_ , Curufin said, his incisors grazing his lower lip in a not-quite smile. _Give that over, Celegorm._

Celegorm huffed, mulishly, but he turned over the bottle.

Curufin looked round, until he met Caranthir’s eyes. Amras’s eyes. Amras thought, _you are not a man yet_ , but it wasn’t a comfort.

Not in Athair’s room.

“How did you do it?”

Mollie blinks. This is—today, again, not a memory, not a raw-stripped bit of flesh that Amras must pretend is bleeding visibly, rather than owning that it lives, sealed-off, between his ribs.

“You mean—”

“Live, as you did.” Amras has spoken bluntly. He is sorry for it now. He knows the question is forward and rude. That was never his province as a child. He was always the quieter one. The one who could be mischievous, yes, but—“I know you were a child; you told me.”

_You are still a child._

Amrod doesn’t jeer, now. He just states things outright. He does all of it in Amras’s head, or beneath silver water-tension, and so Amras cannot reach him. It isn’t fair.

“That was how.” Mollie doesn’t blush. “I was too young to do else. People—people is _mean_ , and hard, Amras. It’s a hard world.”

His Amrod isn’t coming back. Amras says,

“But it didn’t make you bad.”

(He is thinking of Maitimo, today. Maitimo, as well as the water.)

She hangs her head. They are in the ragged Mithrim gardens, working side-by-side so that Mollie can earn her keep, and Amras can keep her safe while she does it. “Other things made me bad,” she says. “Mostly fear. But I was a good clean girl when I could be.”

“Thank you.” He doesn’t say for what.

They have spoken of much in these months: animals and men, trees and taverns. But they don’t talk about Amrod-in-the-water and they don’t talk often, of this.

Amras breaks the rules he has set for himself, footsteps on ice.

Lake Mithrim will never freeze. The air will not turn cold enough.

Curufin is in the infirmary, binding a burn on his hand. Amras is a ghost at the door, pausing only because he questions whether _he_ has a hurt that needs tending.

“I could do it for you.”

A woman’s voice. Nora’s. Amras’s molars grind together.

Curufin doesn’t answer her, at first. His head is tipped forward, so that his hair falls in his eyes. An inconvenience, his hair—it curls at the edge of his collar, now.

One mercy: it makes him look less like Athair.

If Athair is going to be dead, Amras wants him to stay that way. 

“I do it myself,” Curufin says, finally, in that silk-steel tone that he adopted, quite suddenly, on the night that Maglor killed Ulfang.

Amras doesn’t even remember Ulfang’s face.

“Have it your way,” Nora says, with a laugh that grates. “You boys are always in trouble. Some of us care, when we see it.”

“Kind of you,” Curufin says dryly. He ties off the bandage and turns, and he sees Amras. He betrays nothing by his eyes or mouth.

“You hurt your hand,” Amras croaks. He wants to flick Nora’s gaze away, as if it is an insect crawling over his skin.

“The forge is a dangerous place,” Curufin intones. “Deadly, for those who don’t understand it.”

Everything he says has a double meaning. Everything he says is with a consciousness of who hears him say it. Amras doesn’t think Nora—Nora, who is cruel to Mollie—should hear anything that any of them say. She has no right.

“I am but a woman.” Nora laughs another of her laughs. “It’s mine to help and heal.”

Curufin’s smile splits over his face, sharper even than before, and he reaches for Amras’s shoulder, shoving him out of the door. When they are a few steps down the hall, he tucks the smile away.

“At least _yours_ knows her place,” he mutters.

“Let me go,” Amras snaps. He tears himself away. But they are going to the same place; to Athair’s old room. Caranthir is there, mending one of his shirts.

“And here’s another woman,” Curufin observes.

“Shut your trap,” Caranthir says evenly. Maglor is here—and still mad, but in his quiet madness, staring out the narrow shaft of a window.

It is plated with thick glass.

“Have you eaten, Maglor?” Curufin asks, tucking his hands in his pockets. “You did not join us, at midday.”

“I am not hungry,” Maglor replies, tight-voiced.

“You ask the same question every day,” Caranthir says. Curufin ignores him.

Amras slumps to the floor. Their belongings are hunched like displaced gnomes. They divided everything up—and divided it up again, for he and Curufin are still growing—but no matter how the supplies dwindle he tries to count them in eight shares.

It’s one of his many curses.

_You are still a child._

_Not here_ , he scolds. _Not with everyone watching._

Amrod goes away again. Amras scuffs at a clod of mud with one boot. Celegorm and Huan, ever venturing to the dirtiest places, likely dragged it in. Amras would rather be with Celegorm, than here.

“Eat, Maglor,” he says, as a parting shot—and his voice cracks again when he says it, so he runs, not wanting Curufin’s mockery.

Celegorm is at the bridge. Huan is leaning his shaggy head against Celegorm’s thigh, but Celegorm pays him no mind, for once. His arms are folded across his chest.

Celegorm is not as tall as Maedhros, but there are lights by which he looks like him, and this is one such light: midday.

Amras slaps his boots against the ground, so that Celegorm will hear him coming.

They say nothing.

Celegorm’s jaw twitches. Huan whines.

Amras steals a glimpse of the white-burning sun. It hurts him.

_I hate it here. I wish we could all die, all at once, and be with you._

_Ah,_ Amrod sighs. _But you wouldn’t be._

 _No,_ Amras pleads, miserably. _No, don’t—_

Celegorm growls. Huan, curiously, does not.

“What is it?” Amras ask, and realizes in that moment that he did want to speak, to his brother—that that is why he came here at all. He wanted to look out and away from Mithrim, and he wanted the sound of a real voice in his ears.

None of this matters, now. Celegorm is reaching for his gun.

“Cloud of dust,” he says. “Turned up by hoofs and boots and wheels. Someone’s coming.”

“Who?” It’s a question for children and fools. Amras is supposed to be neither.

Celegorm cocks his gun—one of Athair’s guns, or, more properly, one of Curufin’s. “No idea.”

Maybe whoever is coming will kill them.

Amras can hope.


End file.
